“I used to go to school with him,” Dylan said suddenly, feeling tension in his stomach turning to a gnawing. When Josh looked up, Dylan nodded in the direction of the industrial arts teacher. “Mathers, I mean.” He watched as the teacher turned his head, making it look almost as though he were whispering something in Marissa’s ear. “Your aunt did, too.”
“Oh, yeah?” Josh mumbled absently, uninterested.
“Yeah.” Dylan mumbled. Whatever Mathers had said in her ear made her laugh, and she reached out and touched him on the arm. “He ratted on me once to the football coach.”
“Yeah?” Josh turned to Dylan, his interest picking up.
“Yeah. I broke training once—stayed out late one night drinking a few beers.”
“Oh, yeah?” Josh said again. Suddenly Dylan James seemed a lot less like a sheriff and a whole lot more like a regular guy.
“Yeah,” Dylan mumbled, his lips thinning into a narrow line as he watched the two of them head toward the trailer again. “The little creep turned me in.”
Josh’s face broke into a wide grin. “You know, he wears a pocket protector.”
Dylan glanced down at Josh. “You’re kidding.”
“Swear to God,” Josh averred, chuckling.
Dylan glanced back and watched as they disappeared inside the trailer. “What a nerd.”
“You got that right.”
“I figured,” Dylan muttered. “The little worm.”
“A bug,” Josh corrected him. “A real goofus bug.”
Dylan’s head snapped up, and he turned back to Josh. He suddenly realized the kid had dropped his guard, had forgotten about attitude and acting tough. “What did you say?”
“What?” Josh asked, his defenses going back up. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You called him a goofus bug?”
“Oh, that,” he said, his face relaxed. He grimaced a little, and for just an instant his expression turned wistful. “It’s just something my dad used to say.”
Dylan nodded. “Your dad?”
“Yeah, it was kind of a joke we had about this goofylooking dry fly,” Josh explained, tossing the whole handful of pebbles he held to the ground. “You know, for fly-fishing?”
“Yeah, I do know,” Dylan said, reaching into the breast pocket of his shirt. He pulled out a ratty little wad of feathers and string, holding it up. “But for trout, I generally prefer an Adams.”
“Sure I can’t bring you back a soda?” Marissa shook her head. “I’m sure, Rick, thanks.” Rick Mathers dug deep into the pocket of his jeans, bringing out several coins. “I think I’ll just run over to the machine in the teacher’s lounge. I’ll be right back. You won’t change your mind? They’ve got iced tea in there, too.”
“No, thanks,” Marissa insisted, turning away from the window. She looked into his eager face and cringed inside. He was a truly lovely person—polite and attentive. But the fact was, he got on her nerves, and she was edgy enough at the moment. She just wanted to be left alone. “But look, Rick, why don’t you just take off? It’s not necessary for you to stick around. You’re through for the day. I have to wait around for Josh, anyway.”
Rick grinned, the sunlight from the window catching the thick lens of his glasses and glaring back bright. “That’s okay, I don’t mind. Besides, I have some questions for James. After all, I’m responsible for those three boys for a good part of the day. We’ve got a schedule to keep, and I’m curious how often he plans to make these random checks.”
Marissa nodded, then turned back to the window. She let out a long, exasperated sigh, trying to calm her jittery nerves. It was nearly five o’clock, and frankly, she was tired of waiting. Rick had sent the other boys home nearly a half hour ago, and she still had work to do back in her office. She knew she should just go back and try to get some of it done, but she was too antsy to concentrate. What was taking so long?
She peered through the tinted trailer window of the maintenance office and glared across the yard to where Dylan and Josh sat talking. What could they be discussing? Dylan hadn’t kept the other two boys this long. What did he want with Josh? What were they talking about?
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave now.”
Marissa jumped just a little, turning to Harold Wise, the school’s custodian. “That’s okay.”
“I’d offer to stay and lock up, but the district won’t authorize overtime any longer.”
“Don’t worry about it, Harold, I’ll take care of it.” She glanced back out the window, and then to him again. “I shouldn’t be much longer.”
She watched as he picked up his black plastic lunch pail and headed for the trailer door. “You just have to push the button in,” he explained, pointing to the large round button on the lever handle of the door. “And pull the door tight.”
“Thanks,” Marissa mumbled, giving him a little wave. Hot air rushed into the small trailer when he opened the door to leave. It was the heat that had driven her inside the small, air-conditioned office in the first place. The afternoon had turned sweltering.
But apparently Dylan and Josh were impervious to the heat. They’d been huddled in conversation across the yard for the last hour.
She sank down onto a worn brown vinyl chair, frustrated and edgy. The chair groaned, squeaking loudly when she swiveled around to the small metal desk behind her. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk and cradling her chin with her hands. She ignored the clutter of work orders and stale cigarette butts that were littered about. Her mind was focused on Dylan and the conversation he was having with their son.
Their son. Again the thought had every muscle in her body tensing up.
She glanced up at the clock on the wall. An hour. They’d been talking for an hour. Was it just talking? Skip had accused Dylan of harassing them—was he harassing Josh now? Was he questioning him, accusing him of something? Sixty minutes hardly constituted questioning—it qualified more as interrogation.
And what was that business with the football? she thought, making a face. She remembered having glanced across the lawn just as he waved that stupid football around. What was all that about?
Surely he didn’t think Josh had done something wrong. She and Josh had been together almost every minute since he’d been released from jail, and she knew for a fact he’d been good. But if he wasn’t questioning Josh, what was taking so long?
She slammed her hands down hard onto the desk, sending paper and cigarette butts flying. She was tired of waiting, tired of sitting there doing nothing. She was going to find out for herself what Dylan was doing with her son.
She marched to the trailer door, angrily yanking it open.
“Hi,” Josh chirped, a wide grin on his face. His expression quickly changed, however, when the blast of cold air from inside the trailer reached his overheated skin. “Boy, does that air-conditioning feel good.” He stepped inside and leaned down to give Marissa a sweaty kiss on the cheek. “Do you know how hot it is out there?”
“Uh, no—I mean, uh, yeah, I do,” Marissa stammered, sputtering to recover from the surprise. She watched as he stepped past her and made a dash to the small water cooler in the corner. As far as she could tell he looked okay, not exactly like someone who’d spent the last hour being interrogated.
He pulled a paper cup from the dispenser, filling it to the brim. He turned, holding the cup out. “Water, Sheriff?”
Marissa reared around to find Dylan on the step outside. The collar of his uniform was unbuttoned and loose, and the sleeves were rolled causally to the elbow.
He turned his dark gaze to her, giving her a cursory look. “May I?”
“C-come in,” she stuttered, stepping to one side to allow him room to pass.
She closed the trailer door behind him, closing out the hot cloud of air that had come in with them. She watched as they stood by the cooler, downing one paper cup of ice water after another and feeling herself become flushed and uncomfortably warm for entirely different re
asons.
“So…you two all through now?” she asked after a moment. She’d tried to make the question sound casual, but even to her own ears it had sounded stiff and awkward. “With your…talk, I mean?”
Dylan exchanged a look with Josh. “All through,” he said, turning back to her.
“Everything…okay?” she asked when it became obvious neither one was going to elaborate.
“Fine,” Dylan said, nodding.
“Fine,” Josh said, nodding.
Marissa could have screamed. Weren’t they going to tell her anything? She searched Josh’s face in an effort to see what it was he might be feeling. Had Dylan upset him, frightened him? But Josh simply smiled back at her, lifting the water to his lips and gulping down another cup.
She turned to Dylan. “You have everything you need for your report for Judge Kent?”
“I think so,” he said, crushing the paper cup and tossing it across the length of the trailer toward the green metal wastebasket beside the desk. It landed squarely inside. “For now.”
Marissa’s gaze bounced between them, from one to the other. They just stood there, staring at her, and the silence was driving her crazy. Her curiosity was exploding, she wanted to scream and launch into her own interrogation, put them both beneath the white light and demand to know what they’d talked about, why it had taken so long—who and what and why. She searched her brain for a subtle approach, some sort of clever lead-in to get them talking, but she couldn’t come up with much.
“Rick let Skip and Randy leave about a half hour ago,” she said, taking great pains to keep her voice causal. “We’d just assumed you were through with them. I hope that was all right.”
Dylan glanced down at his wristwatch, surprised to find it was after five. Kim was going to wonder what the hell had happened to him.
“Sure,” he said, looking up and watching her knot her fingers together. She looked like she was about ready to leap out of her skin. What was making her so jumpy? “We were all through.”
“Oh,” she said, nodding more than she needed. “I just wondered, well, since it seemed that you and Josh…since it was a bit longer. I thought maybe there was something more you might have wanted to see them about.”
Dylan shook his head. “No, I think that was everything.”
“Great,” she murmured, stepping back a few paces toward the cluttered desk. “That’s…great.”
The small trailer suddenly seemed cramped and airless, despite the noisy air conditioner that blew down on her from the vent in the roof. She almost wished Dylan wasn’t standing between her and the water cooler—she could have used a cool drink herself.
“Karen called down before she left, said she’d made those copies you’d wanted.” She walked back toward the door. “She was going to leave them on my desk. We can stop now, if you’d like, on your way out.”
“Sure, thanks,” Dylan mumbled, getting the distinct impression she wanted him out of there. Why was she so anxious to get rid of him? He turned to Josh, giving him a nod. “Take it easy, kid. I’ll be in touch.”
“Yeah,” Josh mumbled, nodding back.
Marissa was just about to reach for the door when it suddenly pushed open.
“Oh, good, you’re finished,” Rick Mathers said, stepping inside the trailer, holding an opened soft drink can in his hand. He kicked the trailer door closed with his foot, shutting out the glare of the sun.
“We were just on our way to my office,” Marissa explained, wishing there was some diplomatic way she could get him to move away from the door. “The sheriff needs to pick up some papers for his report to the judge.”
Rick nodded, then turned to Dylan. “So, Sheriff, what did you think?”
Dylan’s dark eyes narrowed. Was this why she’d been so jumpy, because she’d known Mathers was coming back? Was this why she’d been so anxious to get rid of him? “I thought everything looked good.”
Rick smiled, lifting the can to his lips and taking a drink. “So you think this will be typical of the checks you plan to make—taking the boys aside and talking to them?”
Dylan’s gaze flickered to Marissa, then back to Mathers. He remembered having watched the two of them together, how they had looked—heads together, talking and laughing. Just what was it Mathers had said to her when he’d leaned so close and made her laugh? What little secrets did they share, what private jokes were there between them?
“Maybe,” he said, being deliberately vague. He wasn’t entirely sure he liked being questioned by this little pipsqueak, especially since it seemed Marissa was perfectly comfortable with allowing him to do it. “I really haven’t decided yet.”
Rick Mathers nodded again, obviously unaware of the undercurrents in Dylan’s voice. He finished the can of soda and tossed it in the direction of the metal trash bin. It clanged noisily against the rim, then fell to the floor and rolled under the desk. “Have you decided how often you plan to schedule these random checks—once a week, every other week, once a month?”
Dylan took several steps forward, glowering down at the teacher and remembered Mathers’s smug expression when the coach chewed him out for breaking training. “If they’re scheduled, they wouldn’t exactly be random, now, would they?”
“I guess not,” Rick conceded with an embarrassed laugh. He walked to the desk, picking up a pack of cigarettes and slipping them into his pocket. “But it’s a little hard for us to keep to a schedule if you’ll be popping in at any given time and putting a halt to everything.”
“I guess that’s just something we’ll have to work out when the time comes,” Dylan said, giving him a cold smile. “Unless, of course, you have a problem with that?”
“Me? No, of course not,” Rick said with a nervous laugh. He turned to Marissa, pointing out the window. “I see a few tools in the yard that I need to put away. I’ll talk to you later?”
“Sure,” Marissa said, reaching over and opening the door of the trailer for him. When he was gone, Marissa slammed the door shut and turned to Dylan. “Look, I’m sorry about Rick. He gets a little carried away sometimes.”
Dylan shrugged carelessly and shook his head. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, turning a sly eye then to Josh. “Goofus bug.”
Josh nodded. “Goofus bug.”
Chapter 6
“What’s a…goofus bug?”
Josh glanced up from his plate of linguini smothered in red sauce and smiled. Swallowing his mouthful, he laughed low in his throat. “Mathers is a goofus bug.”
“That’s Mr. Mathers, if you don’t mind,” Marissa corrected him, giving him a stern look. But her eyes sparkled with humor, and they both knew she wasn’t serious. “And that doesn’t answer my question.”
Josh regarded her for a moment, his grin growing wider. “You really don’t know what a goofus bug is?”
“No, I really don’t know what a goofus bug is,” Marissa repeated, making a face and mimicking his voice. “But apparently Sheriff James does.”
“Yeah, he does,” Josh said, scooping up another forkful of pasta and twisting it into a mouth-size ball. “’Cause he fly-fishes.”
“Fly-fishes?” Marissa lowered her fork to the plate.
“Yeah, you know.” Josh reached out a hand and made a few casting motions with his free hand. “Fly-fishing.”
“You mean, like your dad used to do?”
“Yeah, like that,” Josh said, casting into the air a few more times. “Remember he used to take me?”
“I guess,” Marissa mumbled, taking another bite of pasta, chewing it, then swallowing. God, she’d always hated fishing. “You mean Dylan—Sheriff James fly-fishes?”
Josh nodded, his mouth full of pasta.
She curled more linguini around her fork and took another bite, thinking as she chewed. Fly-fishing. She tried to picture him in her head—standing on the bank of a lake or wading through a stream in hip boots. It wasn’t that she couldn’t see him doing that exactly—with the abundance of streams and lakes
in the Mother Lode, it was certainly a popular-enough sport. But still it surprised her. It surprised her to think that he actually had a real life, with hobbies and interests and concerns. He was, she begrudgingly realized, more than just the football quarterback, or a sheriff with a gun.
“So what does that have to do with a goofus whatever-itis-you-call-it?” she asked after a minute.
“Goofus bug,” Josh clarified, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “It’s a dry fly. You know like a parachute, a bluewinged olive, a gray ghost. Dad used to use a goofus bug once in a while.” He smiled, thinking back. “It’s this dopey-looking thing—even for a fly.” He looked across the table to her. “Didn’t you ever hear my dad call anyone a goofus bug—like when he was driving and somebody cut him off?”
“I guess I didn’t,” Marissa replied, thinking of her brother and the kind, gentle man he had been. Goofus bug. She wouldn’t say she could exactly remember hearing Caleb refer to anyone in that way, but it certainly sounded like something he would have said—especially around Josh. Caleb never would have wanted his son to hear him curse or swear, and goofus bug sounded just like the kind of silly thing he would substitute for what he really wanted to say.
Josh shrugged. “Anyway, it got to be kind of a joke with us—anyone who was kind of nerd or a jerk, a pain in the butt—Oh…sorry.” He grimaced, giving her an apologetic smile. “I mean, anyone who was a pain in the neck was a—”
“Goofus bug,” Marissa finished for him.
Josh reached for his glass of milk, his dark eyes shining. “Jerk,” he mused. “A pain in the neck. Huh…” He grinned wider. “Remind you of anyone?”
“Now, stop that,” Marissa scolded, trying her best to keep a straight face. “Rick’s okay.”
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